Torture Memo Author Finds Friends and Foes at Chapman U

Perhaps some of you have a conservative uncle who says stupid things. You know, like the U.S. is not in debt to China, or that Barack Obama is a socialist or that George W. Bush won his presidential elections.

Mine recently repeated the Bill O'Reilly/Rush Limbaugh/Attila the Hun yarn about all the students and professors at UC Berkeley being flaming liberals. I tried to politely bring up the stuntmeisters known as the Berkeley College Republicans, who in 2003 famously held an Affirmative Action Bake Sale on campus, charging white students more per muffin than Latinos and African Americans.

"Nope," Unc told me, "must've been a figment of your imagination."

Okay, if he did not hear of the bake sale, which only made international headlines after all, he may be surprised to learn Berkeley's chancellor revealed in the British press that the College Republicans represent the largest student political club on campus.

How about Boalt Hall, the conservative-leaning UC law school, whose dean home of professor John Yoo, who worked in the Bush Administration, where he penned the famous torture memo that greenlit waterboarding and violations of the Geneva Convention before he returned to the UC Beserkely.

"What torture memo?"

Perhaps Uncle Knuckle-dragger can be dragged over to Chapman University, where Yoo is teaching while on temporary leave from UC You-Know-Where. Indeed, the Los Angeles Times (a.k.a. Pravda) blogs that Yoo may have come south to escape ultra-liberal Berkeley, where city leaders branded him a war criminal and human rights activists erected a billboard to denounce him.

Yoo has denied Berkeley's liberal tilt had anything to do with his move south, saying he just wanted to spend time on a smaller, newer campus, to experience living in Southern California, to tower over Jim Doti. Okay, I made up that last one.

But local peace activists say they plan to give Yoo a little of the old ultra-nonviolence, and guess who is egging them on? None other than their lefty NorCal counterparts, who plan to come on down to join in the yammerin'. The website FireJohnYoo.org has all the sordid details.

Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before "graduating" to OC Weekly in 1995 as the paper's first calendar editor. He has contributed as a freelance editor and writer to several publications and been the subject of or featured in several reports online, in print and on the radio and television. One of countless times he returned to his Costa Mesa, CA, home with a bounty of awards from a journalism competition, his wife told him to take out the trash.